News | May 15, 2024

NetApp Unveils Unified Data Storage System Built For The AI ​​Era

San Jose, CA (BUSINESS WIRE) - NetApp ® (NASDAQ: NTAP), an intelligent data infrastructure company, today announced new AFF A-Series systems capable of handling the most demanding IT workloads. including GenAI, VMware and enterprise databases. NetApp also announced advanced capabilities across its portfolio to help customers operate more efficiently by using their data to drive innovation.

In the age of AI, organizations feel pressure to step up innovation, discover new customer experiences, thwart cyber threats and become ever more productive. Many organizations view AI as an essential tool to help them achieve these goals. According to the 2024 NetApp Cloud Complexity report , enterprises realize that business success with AI relies on two critical factors, data (74%) and IT infrastructure (71%). With today's announcements, NetApp is helping businesses excel in both areas and gain competitiveness by delivering an intelligent, innovative data infrastructure that enables customers to unlock the value of their data through 'AI.

NetApp's new AFF A-Series systems confirm NetApp's leadership in unified data storage for the next generation of workloads. Built on the same technology used by the three major public clouds, NetApp's AFF A-Series systems avoid storage silos and complexity, providing robust, intelligent and secure storage that helps boost and optimize all workloads. This includes built-in capabilities to optimize VMware storage costs today and provide the best possible flexibility for the future.

“Data is arguably the most valuable asset for any business that wants to get ahead of its competitors. Whether it's mission-critical applications or leveraging enterprise data to power AI, the data infrastructure a business chooses to run it on makes all the difference,” says Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and Head of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “NetApp's broad and unified data storage portfolio, from on-premises to public clouds, makes it the solution of choice for businesses that want the resilience to meet the most demanding workloads. The introduction of the new AFF A-Series systems demonstrates our unwavering commitment to providing the highest performance, smartest and most secure enterprise storage on the market. »

New AFF A-Series Systems Improve Efficiency in Business Technology Operations
With the introduction of new, higher-performance AFF A-Series all-flash storage systems, NetApp continues its commitment to innovation with unified data storage systems designed for any data, any application, and any cloud . The new AFF A-Series storage systems easily power the most demanding workloads, from traditional mission-critical applications to the GenAI workloads that will drive business success into the future.

These new systems are NetApp's AFF A1K, AFF A90 and AFF A70, which help boost enterprise workloads by providing the following benefits:

  • Up to twice the performance with 40 million IOPs and 1 TB/s throughput;
  • Data availability proven at 99.9999%;
  • Leading raw capacity to effective capacity, including permanent data reduction and 4:1 storage efficiency guarantee;
  • Built-in real-time ransomware detection with over 99% accuracy and guaranteed ransomware recovery.

NetApp Unified Data Storage supports block, file, and object storage protocols and natively integrates with the three largest public cloud providers, allowing customers to consolidate workloads, reduce the cost of data and operating without silos. Powered by NetApp's ONTAP ® , these systems deliver the simplicity and reliability that tens of thousands of businesses have come to expect from NetApp.

“As we have increased our investments in artificial intelligence projects to accelerate our business, we have had to expand our data infrastructure to deliver ever higher throughput for these workloads,” Christian Klie, Group Head Tribe at T-Systems. “We rely on intelligent data infrastructure provided by NetApp to power our most critical workloads. Additionally, the increased performance of the new AFF A-Series systems, coupled with their built-in anti-ransomware features and hybrid cloud capabilities, will help position us for success now and in the future. »

“AI is creating the biggest business transformation opportunity we’ve seen in decades, enabling companies to generate new sources of value from their data,” said Justin Hotard, executive vice president and director Intel's General, Data Center and AI Group. “NetApp's AFF A-Series systems using Intel Xeon processors deliver the performance and features needed to help businesses accelerate their adoption of AI. »

Deliver a high-performance, intelligent and secure enterprise data infrastructure
To continue to innovate as an intelligent data infrastructure company, NetApp has launched additional capabilities to provide customers with advanced data management, industry-leading ransomware protection, and cloud integration that support workloads. modern technologies such as GenAI require.

New features and functionality in NetApp Data Management and Integrated Services include:

  • New StorageGRID Models : NetApp introduced six new StorageGRID models that increase the value of big, unstructured data while reducing total cost of ownership. StorageGRID can now use flash capacity to provide fast object access times at the lowest cost. Customers can benefit from a new level of flexibility, choice, performance and durability for mission-critical object workloads with new models that deliver a highly competitive price per GB, up to 3x better performance, a footprint reduction of 80% and a reduction in energy consumption of up to 70%.
  • Virtual Vault Reference Architecture : NetApp announced a new Virtual Vault reference architecture, which expands the company's data protection capabilities. Combining the latest advances in secure data storage, real-time autonomous ransomware detection and rapid data recovery, NetApp's secure and resilient virtual vault offers logically air-gapped storage based on ONTAP, NetApp's proven technology for unparalleled protection of customer data against advanced cyber threats.
  • SnapMirror Active Sync : The latest version of ONTAP includes SnapMirror active sync which creates a symmetrical active-active business continuity solution across two data centers. Paired with VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) and enterprise databases from Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, SnapMirror active sync enables business operations to continue without interruption in the event of a data center outage .
  • FlexCache with Writeback: The new version of ONTAP also includes FlexCache with Writeback which creates local copies of data for distributed teams, helping to reduce latency and ensure uninterrupted access while reducing administrative overhead . Local copies can read and write data, allowing local teams to have greater control while maintaining data consistency with the primary data center.
  • NetApp AIPod with Lenovo : NetApp and Lenovo are working on a new converged infrastructure solution designed for Augmented Recovery Generation (RAG) and GenAI inference use cases, with high-performance Lenovo ThinkSystem servers . performance using NVIDIA L40S GPUs , NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking, and NetApp AFF storage, all validated with the NVIDIA OVX architecture specification .
  • BlueXP Classification : This AI/ML-based service is now available as a base capability of BlueXP at no additional cost, giving users immediate access to the ability to automatically classify, categorize and label data across the board. of data assets to develop data intelligence, improve management, security and compliance efforts, while enabling mission-critical workloads such as GenAI. With BlueXP Classification, customers can now drive GenAI and RAG innovations through AIOps' ability to securely and programmatically augment pre-trained models with self-classified proprietary data on-demand for better relevance without sacrificing cost or data security.

“AI represents an exceptional opportunity for businesses to leverage their data in new ways to gain competitive advantages,” Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies and search BuyerView at IDC. “However, as the AI ​​market grows, the way organizations approach AI may change. They need a storage infrastructure that gives them the flexibility to combine their on-premises data storage with cloud environments. NetApp's strategy of providing a powerful unified data storage system compatible with any data protocol, in any environment, to run any workload, provides its customers with the power and the flexibility they need to meet any challenges that come their way. »

Join NetApp for a special event on May 14 at 9am PT to learn about its next major advancement in unified data storage, built for the AI ​​era: https://netapp.com/

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About NetApp
NetApp is the intelligent data infrastructure company, combining unified data storage, integrated data services and CloudOps solutions to transform a disruptive world into an opportunity for every customer. NetApp creates an infrastructure without silos, leveraging observability and AI to enable industry-leading data management. As the only enterprise storage service natively integrated into the world's largest clouds, our data storage delivers seamless flexibility. Additionally, our data services provide a data advantage through superior cyber resiliency, governance and application agility. Our CloudOps solutions enable continuous optimization of performance and efficiency through observability and AI. Regardless of data type, workload, or environment, with NetApp you can transform your data infrastructure to realize your business opportunities. Learn more at www.netapp.com or follow us on X , LinkedIn , Facebook and Instagram .

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